Friday 18 June 2004 20.27 EDT
First published on Friday 18 June 2004 20.27 EDT

Mr Starlightby Laurie Graham 304pp, Fourth Estate, £10.99

What if Liberace had been born in Saltley, Birmingham, instead of Milwaukee, Wisconsin? That's the premise of Laurie Graham's entertaining novel about Selwyn Boff, who parleys spangly jackets, candelabra, piety and public devotion to his mum into a showbiz package that propels him to international stardom. A singer rather than a pianist, Selwyn's career otherwise resembles Liberace's - performing with dance bands, winning a Las Vegas nightclub following with his lavish productions and chatty persona, developing a flamboyant and campy stage style in concerts and television, and brazenly denying his homosexuality, despite exposés in scandal mags, palimony claims from disgruntled lovers, and a lingering death from Aids.

How to make such a lurid figure the centre of a comic novel? Graham solves the problem by telling Selwyn's story from the point of view of his older brother Cledwyn, an aspiring musician and failed song-writer ("Gnat on the Windscreen of My Life"), who plays second fiddle to Sel all his life. To Cled, Sel is always "His Numps", a childish dreamer who believes that he has had a vision of an angel promising him fame, fortune, and Higher Purpose if he will go to America.

An unfailingly unreliable narrator who ignores tickling-matches with various porters, bellhops, waiters and gardeners, just as he tries to ignore his brother's huge accomplishments, Cled is also very funny. He doesn't see, or doesn't know, much about Sel's sex life, and casts a rosy light on even the most dysfunctional aspects of the Boff clan, but his memoir is also a running commentary on the changes in British and American mass culture after the second world war, a topic Graham has written about engagingly in her other novels, especially The Future Homemakers of America, about American military wives stationed in England in the 40s.

Mr Starlight is just as fresh and even more ambitious than Graham's previous bestsellers. Graham suggests that the campy celebrity could have been as much a British as an American boy, and that his rise from a house with a tin bath, outside lav, and jerry under the bed to a mansion with six bathrooms also fulfilled English dreams of riches. She creates a Dickensian cast of absurd entertainers - a novelty gargler is especially memorable - alongside vignettes of real celebrities including Gracie Fields and Fred Astaire. She makes inventive use of the titles and lyrics of popular songs, from "Till Then" to "There Was a Boy", which take on surprising emotional depth in context.

Selwyn is a shrewd manipulator of his audience, and a shameless vulgarian, but he has his own moral code. First, the show must go on. Second, the audience wants to see a Star, someone impossibly glamorous but disarmingly friendly. Third, sexuality is private, and not part of the act. "I always thought I was one of Mother Nature's slip-ups," he tells Cled, when Gay Pride is after him to come out. "I never expected any sympathy. But I never saw it as something to brag about either." When the trends change, the sponsors cancel and the big stadiums want Elton John, Sel is determined to stay "retro", even if he has to wow "towns so small they didn't even have a set of traffic lights". After his death, the president of his fan club declares, "We don't need an autopsy to know that he had a kind heart."

Mr Starlight is a bit retro, too, and Sel is much sweeter and gentler than the original - but the result is so delicious that no one will mind extra sugar in the story.